Buffalo Minisation Turbo USB hard drive review

Perfect for travelling, or just another burden?

19 October 2007 9:00 GMT / By Stephen Patrick

The price of hard drives have tumble din recent months, which makes buying an external backup drive great financial sense at the moment. This 120GB HDD from Buffalo costs a mere £60 (inc. VAT) has been designed with the mobile user in mind. The drive is encased in a black plastic casing that is extremely well protected against drops and knocks. So, even if you treat the drive with minimum respect and just through it in your kit bag, it should continue to work unscathed.

It works with either Mac OS or Windows XP and Vista, so anyone can make the most of it. Simply plugging the drive in is enough to install the drivers and you have yourself 120GB of extra space. That’s not all, though, as Buffalo as bundled a selection of software with the drive that helps backing up your notebook’s files easier. There are also security tools to keep the information safe.

The USB port you hook it up into powers the drive. However, the Turbo of the name comes in to play when you slot in the second USB lead that comes supplied as this will power the disk to full speed and you’ll be able to copy files up to 60 per cent faster. In practise this works exceedingly well and while you have to sacrifice two USB ports to get full speed, you don’t need to keep it plugged in all the time.